The idea behind the name
Why We Are Called
TheTruNorth
The brightest thing in view is not always the thing worth following.
The name came from a study table.
I was helping my daughter through a school physics chapter—the section on astronomy and how the sky is mapped—when we came to True North. Not magnetic north, towards which a compass points, but the geographic north around which the sky appears to turn.
At the same time, I was working out what to call the firm I was about to start. Sitting there explaining the idea to her, it landed: True North was what I had been trying to name. Not a clever coinage. A concept I had been circling without having the words for it.
The name stuck. A friend helping me shape it dropped the “e” from True—TheTruNorth—and it was done.
But the reason it stuck is worth explaining, because the concept became the whole idea behind the firm.
The brightest star is not always the one to follow
The night sky offers thousands of directions. Almost none are worth following.
The brightest stars pull your eye first—blazing, impossible to ignore. But they are of little use to someone trying to find their way home. They rise, set and appear to travel across the sky through the night. Steer by the most dazzling thing above you and you may end up somewhere you never meant to be.
Sailors learned to look instead towards a much quieter star—Polaris. It is not the brightest star in the sky. But because it lies close to the celestial north pole, it appears almost fixed while the rest of the sky turns around it. That made it a reliable guide: a point against which everything else could be judged.
A business faces the same distinction. It is surrounded by directions that distract—this quarter’s campaign, a competitor’s move, the channel everyone has just shifted to, the trend the category is chasing.
Each is plausible. Each pulls.
What a business usually lacks is the one direction that guides: the fixed point it can steer by, the idea that holds when the quarter changes and allows every smaller choice to be judged against it.
The work
That is what we do. We help a business find the one point it should steer by, surrounded by a thousand bright directions competing for its attention.
Brand, at its highest, is not merely communication. It is the fixed point that organises the direction of the business.
Find it, and every decision has a clearer basis.
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